Adjusting and Enhancing Images The cropping tool lets you rotate, resize, and deform an image's dimensions. You can maintain aspect ratio or not. For straightening, though, you don't get the kind of help you do with Apple's iPhoto for iPad, which even lets you use the iPad's accelerometer to straighten a photo. Nor does Photoshop Touch use Photoshop CS6's straightening view that keeps the frame level while the image angle changes. Now it's easy to rotate a photo 90 degrees.

I was able to fix an image's exposure to good effect using Levels and Curves, and even more simply with the Shadows and Highlights adjustments. Saturation and colors can also be manipulated to your heart's content. And you can use the brush to paint on these effects with an edge-aware brush—pretty spiffy. Noise reduction did an acceptable job of smoothing out spotty low-light areas of a photo. Auto-fix did a decent job of punching up drab photos, and I could also go in and adjust saturation and color temperature. I would like to see Auto options for all these sub-adjusters, too.

Some of the more spiffy image enhancements around today come with Photoshop Touch: There are old photo looks a la Instagram, artistic options like a cartoon drawing effect, and a multi gradient map. While you do get Gaussian and directional blur and a blur brush, I miss Snapseed's faux tilt-shift and bokeh effects, but you can actually apply both of these effects with Photoshop Touch tools and layers. In general, you'll find more fun prebuilt effects in Snapseed ($9.99, 4 stars) or Pixlr-o-matic ($0.99, 3 stars).

Two new effects, Colorize and Shred, arrive in version 1.3. The first offers a lot of control over pumping up different color values in your image, while letting you adjust luminosity and mix. The Shred effect turns your image into posterized confetti, but since it didn't let me reduce the size of the shreds enough, any image I tried it on was unrecognizable after applying this effect.

Drawing and Text Don't expect to find anywhere near the wealth of drawing and text tools that come in Photoshop CS6. What you do get with Photoshop Touch is well suited to what you'd be doing on a tablet. The brush is of just the basic type—no erodible pencils or airbrush here—but you can resize the tip easily, change its hardness, flow, and opacity, and choose any color.

The text tool is also everything you'd hope for: 29 arresting fonts, flexible scaling and color choice, and the abilty to deform text. You can't, however, wrap text around a circular object, as you can in Photoshop Elements 10, but you can easily position it. As in grown-up Photoshop, added text creates a new layer, so you can turn it on and off at will. One problem with the text tool, though, was that, after adding text and heading to another layer, I couldn't edit the appearance of the text later.

Sharing Once I finished a test project, Photoshop Touch offered a multitude of ways to send my work out to the world or to myself for further work. The simplest option was to save it to my Camera Roll, followed by emailing and sharing to Facebook. I could also upload it to Adobe Creative Cloud and then access it from CS6. You do need to install a free plugin on your desktop copy of Photoshop to access the files, though. Finally, I could also print to an AirPort-connected printer.

The Post-PC PhotoshopAdobe has done an excellent job fitting its leading image editor to the tablet form factor. Photoshop Touch 1.3 makes good use of multitouch input, and is easy and intuitive. If you're a Photoshop maven who likes the idea of getting layers and standard Photoshop tools on your iPad or Android tablet, Adobe Photoshop Touch is an essential 10-dollar app. The ability to start a project on the tablet and finish it on the desktop, along with the app's generous sharing options makes it all the more attractive. Just don't expect quite the results you'd get with desktop Photoshop. Snapseed, may offer more effects and photo fine-tuning, but Photoshop Touch is a different animal, offering a fuller set of image-manipulation tools, which earns it our Editors' Choice for tablet-based image-editing apps.

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine’s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine’s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael...

Automatic Renewal Program: Your subscription will continue without interruption for as long as you wish, unless
you instruct us otherwise. Your subscription will automatically renew at the end of the term unless you authorize
cancellation. Each year, you'll receive a notice and you authorize that your credit/debit card will be charged the
annual subscription rate(s). You may cancel at any time during your subscription and receive a full refund on all
unsent issues. If your credit/debit card or other billing method can not be charged, we will bill you directly instead. Contact Customer Service